Thursday, May 8, 2014

I could describe today in three words: all day rain. It didn't just rain. There were 60 MPH straight line winds, tornado warnings, severe weather sirens wailing in the neighborhood, power outages, and non-stop weather coverage on all the local TV stations. Needless to say, the dogs weren't happy about all this, but we ended up being pretty lucky. The worst of the storm went to the North of us and all we got was a lot of heavy rain.

Amazingly, during all this commotion, we managed to squeeze in two fairly normal walks. We took our morning walk early, before the downpour began, and then when the skies began to clear around sunset, we walked again. I saw lots of downed trees in the park on our evening walk, but our own trees suffered no damage. I think the weak trees have already been knocked down in previous storms. The ones that are left are pretty hardy. I'm still surprised that our power didn't go out. Usually our neighborhood is the first to go. Even though there were outages all over the city, our lights didn't even flicker. Like I said, we got lucky today.

Since I was more or less housebound all day, I managed to get completely caught up on work. It wasn't that I wanted to work; there just wasn't anything else to do. When I got my writing and website chores finished, I did my May invoices and got them ready to mail. I didn't go to the post office though. I didn't want a tree to fall on my car like some of the pictures I'd been seeing on Facebook today. The car never left the driveway. I learned a long time ago that the best thing you can do during stormy weather is stay home and take a nap with the dogs.

It's so nice not to have a leaking roof anymore. Even though I know there is four inches of standing water up there now, it's no big deal. I'll still have to remove the water eventually, but it's not a major crisis like it used to be. One of the main reasons I still have to get the water off the roof is that once ponds form, things start to grow in them. Once I left the water up there too long and saw hundreds of tiny tadpoles swimming around in a large puddle. Standing water attracts mosquitoes too. It's not really what you want on the top of your house.

Dash continues to get stronger. The radiation burn on his neck is no longer red and raw. It is becoming a pinkish color that actually does remind me of a bad sunburn. Maybe I'm imagining things, but every day, the radiation damaged skin seems a bit more normal. Everything seems a bit more normal this week. Even though it had been a very stormy day, both dogs were eager to take their evening walk. I think cabin fever finally overcame their fear of storms. They definitely had things to do and places to go this evening. I had trouble keeping up with them.

About Me

John Sealander received a Bachelor of Architecture and a BA in Art from
The University of Arkansas. His rich and diverse experience includes
working as an architectural designer for Fred Bassetti in Seattle,
producing documentary films for PBS, shooting commercial photography
for True Redd’s “Great Shooting Gallery” in Dallas and teaching writing
courses at SMU’s Academy of Visual Communication. For over 35 years,
John has developed memorable and award winning ads and images for some
of the world’s leading ad agencies and most popular brands. In 1990 he
started Sealander & Company, the Dallas, Texas based production
company and multi-media agency where he continues to develop his ideas
today.